During minimally invasive surgeries, medical imaging devices may be introduced into a subject's body to illuminate and image body cavities, organs or other tissue. Advantages of using internal medical imaging devices include the ability to avoid large incisions and the ability to image biological tissue. Many imaging devices also include one or more lenses that focus images onto an eyepiece and/or imaging lens. Still or video cameras may be used to capture image data using a medical imaging device.
Medical imaging devices can enable surgeries to be performed in a manner that is less intrusive and often safer for patients. While this brings many benefits to patients, it presents a number of challenges for the surgeon who must work within a very confined surgical compartment. In particular, surgeons must deal with poor visibility, limited lighting, and a narrow viewing angle. Because of their size, conventional medical imaging devices tend to have limited imaging resolution, often fail to provide more than one perspective of biological tissue, and due to visible lighting constraints, often fail to show differences in biological tissue.
Minimally invasive surgeries increasingly occur in operating rooms equipped with advanced audio-visual technology. At one end of the spectrum are integrated operating rooms, that combine high resolution video displays, touch screen control, access to digital information through the hospital network, and data archiving capability into an interconnected purpose-built system. In addition to facilitating surgical procedures and improving efficiency, integrated operating rooms can also connect the surgeon in the sterile field with people and information outside the operating room. For example, an integrated operating room can enable: live consultation with pathology and ICU; real-time collaboration with surgeons across the globe; live feeds to conference rooms and auditoriums for training and grand rounds; and data exchange with an electronic medical record system, radiological picture archiving and communication system (PACS), or network-enabled devices in other operating and treatment rooms.
In many surgical procedures it is critical to monitor the status or health of tissue or organs surrounding any given surgical procedure. Perfusion, which measures the rate tissue or an organ absorbs fluid, can be used to distinguish normal tissue from diseased tissue. One technique used is to inject contrast fluid into the blood stream and use imaging modalities to measure the rate the blood spreads through the tissue or organ. Another technique is to use an endoscopic optical sensor to measure both the amount and speed of change in one or more of the spectral components reflected from the surface of tissue or an organ in response to a heartbeat, a patient's breath, or an external stimulus to measure and characterize the state of body tissue and organs.